Lela smiled. She removed her Ray-Bans as they came to a cliff face that rose at least a hundred feet in the air. At the bottom was a scattering of massive limestone chunks, once part of the cliff that had long ago collapsed. Jack led the way into a six-foot-wide chasm on the right. Twenty paces later their path ended at a cave mouth. Limestone debris had been moved to a mound on the right, a rockfall that had been cleared away.
“This is where we found our treasure. Do confined spaces bother you, Lela?”
“If you mean am I claustrophobic, the answer is... sometimes. It depends how small the space is.”
“Not too small, but maybe you better hold on to me. There are some holes where we’d been digging.” Jack held out his hand to her. “Ready?”
Lela’s eyes met his. “When you are.”
Jack winked at her, a tiny smile flickering on his lips, and then she took his hand, held her breath, and let him lead her inside the cave.
15
Lela saw that inside the cave several holes had been dug into the ground. Jack stepped around them, leading the way, shining the torch. He halted when he came to a hole that was about a yard wide and the same deep. A mound of clay was piled behind it.
“This is where we found our trove.” Jack’s voice echoed inside the cave.
“You found only one scroll inside the jar? Is that usual?”
“Sometimes scrolls have been found singly, or sometimes we get a whole bunch of them in one place. It could be just a single page consisting of twenty lines, or dozens of pages all rolled together. There’s no rule.”
Jack shone the torch as Lela knelt to examine the bare, three-feet-deep rut in the ground where the jar had once lain. She plucked a handful of the gritty dirt, let it run through her fingers, then dusted her hands and stood. “Tell me when you last saw the professor.”
“We’d all had a few drinks to celebrate, then everyone began to head to bed between three and four A.M., me included, while the professor carried on examining the scroll. I was asleep when Yasmin woke me to say her uncle wanted to see me at once, that he had found something in the text he wanted me to look at. I stayed talking with Professor Green until five-forty A.M.”
“How did he seem?”
“Like he was walking on air. That’s the only way to describe it. He was thrilled.”
“No arguments?”
Jack raised an eyebrow. “Are you kidding? What was there to argue about? The professor believed that the find would help confirm the existence of Jesus Christ. Despite what you might think, archaeological evidence of that fact is thin on the ground. There’s the Bible, sure, but outside of that and the historian Josephus’s account of Christ, there are few ancient documents that actually corroborate his life. Finding a scroll like this one, mentioning Jesus and specific deeds relating to him, would be pretty powerful confirmation if proven to be genuine.”
“You really believe the parchment is genuine?”
“Yes, I do. It’s also truly remarkable. Archaeology has never produced anything that is a clear contradiction to the Bible. But this scroll does.”
“Did Green try to claim any credit for the discovery?”
“No, Lela. He seemed happy I’d hit the jackpot, and was full of praise.”
“You sound very sure you left the professor at five-forty.”
“I checked my watch as I left Green’s tent. I was trying to make up my mind if I’d go straight to bed or watch the sunrise. I was still excited.”
“Did you see anyone else in the vicinity of Green’s tent at that time?”
“Not a soul. Everyone appeared to have gone to bed.”
“Except Yasmin.”
“Obviously.”
Lela said quietly, “I heard that you and the professor had your differences.”
“Green could be a difficult guy sometimes. Temperamental, even aggressive. Sure, we had minor clashes. But I didn’t kill him, Lela.”
“The professor was found dead at six A.M. You were the last to see him alive.”
“So?”
“Mosberg said that one of the crew who arrived at Professor Green’s tent soon after you and the others had already got there claimed that you had blood on your hands, Jack.”
“So did everyone else who helped try to stop the bleeding from Green’s wound.”
“You mean Yasmin and your friend Buddy?”
“Not Yasmin; she blacked out. The sight of blood gets to her, apparently. Her uncle’s bloody torso must have been too much. But Buddy and I tried to resuscitate the professor. We weren’t a hundred percent certain that he was beyond help so we decided to try to restart his heart.”
“Who decided?”
“I did. But the knife kept getting in the way and we were too afraid to pull it out or touch it in case we did more damage. So the resuscitation was a pretty awkward attempt and we all got blood on our hands and clothes.”
“It was your knife.”
“I loaned it to the professor when he called me to his tent. He used it to delicately raise the parchment while he read the text. I was so tired I guess I forgot to take the knife back.”
“We found no prints on it. Not even yours. The hilt was wiped clean.”
“My prints are probably everywhere else. I was in the professor’s tent pretty much every day.”